By Saturday afternoon, Hurricane Ike had been downgraded to a tropical storm, but not before unleashing its full force on Galveston and Houston, Texas, along with coastal Louisiana. Both states were dealing with widespread power outages in Ike’s wake, and the extent of the damage couldn’t be fully assessed until flooding subsided and debris was cleared.

With the mainstream news largely riveted on the U.S. election campaign and convention mania, little attention has been paid to the aftermath of the series of storms that rocked the Caribbean this past month. Flooding in Haiti has put 600,000 people at serious risk as hunger and disease rise in what Haitian President Rene Preval calls a “catastrophe.”